Newsletter: December 2010

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After high school, all of Cinthia C.’s friends scattered around the country, while she enrolled at John Jay College in NYC. She was “nervous, scared, and overwhelmed about going to a school in the middle of New York City.” But before classes started, she was invited to join the John Jay College Directory. Excited, she used the Directory to find people who shared her interests, and suggested they meet before orientation. Today, Cinthia has a group of friends that she met through the Directory, and now that she is beginning her second semester, she says, “If I could summarize my feelings in one word, it would be comfortable.”

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The Associated Students of New Mexico State University use their website to provide information about NMSU’s student government, but it also serves as a hub for all of their different web tools. The site includes Facebook and Twitter feeds, a polling widget to get student input for event planning, and even streams music from KRUX, the campus radio station.

Groups like ASNMSU can use the Student Directory to bring content from all of their different web tools into one location, and with the new activity feed and commenting features, the Directory can connect individual members together around the group’s activity. Log into the your institution’s Red Rover Directory and click on “Activity” for a look at all of the action in your community.

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Now, new members can join campus groups with a text message. Leaders can invite members anytime, anywhere (unless they are recruiting members from an underground bunker).

Here’s how it works:

1. Choose a unique, memorable hashtag to identify your group within the Student Directory.

2. New members text the group’s #hashtag to your institution’s Directory phone number.

3. If the new member hasn’t joined the Directory, they’ll receive a text response with sign up instructions.

Contact us for more info on texting features, or keep your eyes on our blog for updates.

Earlier this year, the band OK Go brought Rube Goldberg machines—which use comically complex machinery to perform simple tasks—back into pop culture with the music video for “This Too Shall Pass.” But college students have been participating in Purdue’s Rube Goldberg Machine Competition since 1987, competing to see which team could engineer the most complicated machine.

The team from the University of Wisconsin – Stout won last year’s competition with an Egyptian-themed device that used more than 20 steps to dispense a squirt of hand sanitizer. Check out the video below to see it in action: